Crazy Love You by Lisa Unger

Author:Lisa Unger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

Chapter Nineteen

Detective Jones Cooper came to our house the day after the art room fire. It was Sunday morning, and I was playing video games. My dad was reading the paper. We were both feeling down because we’d been to see my mother the day before and it hadn’t gone well. It seemed like she was never going to be able to come home.

“I want to die, Nick,” she said. “Why didn’t they let me die?”

“We have a son,” he whispered to her. I was sitting right there, playing my Game Boy. Maybe they thought I couldn’t hear them; maybe they were just too far gone in their own unhappiness to care. “He needs you. I need you.”

“I don’t even exist,” she said. “I’m a ghost.”

“Don’t say that,” my father said. “Please.”

My father and I went out to dinner that night, him staring at his food, me shoveling it in, not talking. We hadn’t really talked since the blowout we’d had after my last visit with Dr. Crown. And I hadn’t been back to art class. Miss Rose showed my father my work, then he and Dr. Crown had used it against me to get inside my head. I hated them all. The only person I was still talking to was my grandmother, and she was around less and less. Who could blame her?

When the knock came at the front door, something inside me went cold. I got up and left the room, went upstairs, and closed my door. My father had bought me an artist’s draft table for Christmas. And that’s where I spent my time when I wasn’t plastered to the television. I stood at my window and saw a squad car, as well as Cooper’s maroon SUV. My stomach bottomed out. What had she done now?

I heard the door open and close downstairs. And then there was silence, a stretching silence that went on too long. Finally, I crept from my room and stood on the landing, listening.

“This is the second arson attempt in The Hollows in under a year,” I heard Cooper say. “Both of which followed an altercation with your son. Ian is going to need to come in for questioning.”

“This is ridiculous,” my father said. “You know us.”

“I’m sorry, man,” said Cooper. “This isn’t personal.”

They let me ride in my father’s car, though I would have preferred the squad car. I’d never been in one, and I was childish enough to think it would have been cool. The gravity of the situation hadn’t dawned on me. And to be honest, a kind of apathy had settled. Too much stress, unhappiness, loneliness. I was shutting down in significant ways.

It must have showed, because Cooper was different with me during this second questioning. He was more distant, treating me less like a troubled kid needing his help and more like an adult suspected of a serious crime. The gloves were off. He walked me through the station and led me to an interrogation room, a gray room without windows.

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